Month: January 2013

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First ‘personhood’ bill of session is filed

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Personhood BillOKLAHOMA CITY – One of last year’s most emotional issues for the Oklahoma Legislature apparently will be revisited this spring, with at least one “personhood” bill already filed for the session that begins Feb. 4.

“Personhood,” a concept popular among abortion-rights opponents, holds that individual rights and constitutional protections begin at conception.

State Rep. Mike Reynolds, R-Oklahoma City, is the author of House Bill 1029, the Personhood Act of 2013. As written, the bill appears to be virtually identical to one that led to a bitter fight in the House of Representatives before it failed to get a vote on the floor.

A resolution with the same language as the bill but without the force of law did pass in the House, with several personhood supporters condemning it as a sellout. Read full article.

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Planned Parenthood goes beyond “pro-choice”

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Planned-ParenthoodWith a new campaign released today, Planned Parenthood has quietly signaled a move away from the “pro-choice” label.

The women’s health provider has long been the target of conservative chest-pounding (and budget slashing), and their latest video “Not In Her Shoes” is their first effort to get past the divisive rhetoric:

Most things in life aren’t simple. And that includes abortion. It’s personal. It can be complicated. And for many people, it’s not a black and white issue. So why do people try to label it like it is? Pro-choice? Pro-life? The truth is these labels limit the conversation and simply don’t reflect how people actually feel about abortion.

A majority of Americans believe abortion should remain safe and legal. Many just don’t use the words pro-choice. They don’t necessarily identify as pro-life either. Truth is, they just don’t want to be labeled.

What they want is for a woman to have access to safe and legal abortion, if and when she needs it. Read full article.

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Court: Ind. man must support kids by sperm donor

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MUNCIE, Ind. — An appeals court ruled Tuesday that a man whose then-wife conceived two children using the sperm of a family friend must provide financial support for the youngsters.

The Indiana Court of Appeals on Tuesday upheld an earlier ruling by Delaware Circuit Court 4 Judge John Feick that the children — born in 2004 and 2006, respectively — each qualify as a “child of marriage.”

When the husband filed for divorce in Feick’s court in October 2010, he acknowledged that “two children were born to (his spouse)” during their nine-year marriage, but said they were not his “biological children” and that he should not be held responsible for their financial support.

In its Tuesday ruling, the appeals court said after the couple married in 2001, they discussed having children, and were told by a physician that an effort to reverse the husband’s earlier vasectomy would likely be unsuccessful. Read full article.

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Court lifts cloud over embryonic stem cells

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embryonic stem cellsThe US Supreme Court’s decision last week to throw out a lawsuit that would have blocked federal funding of all research on human embryonic stem cells cleared the gloom that has hung over the field for more than three years. Yet the biggest boost from the decision might go not to work on embryonic stem (ES) cells, but to studies of their upstart cousins, induced pluripotent stem (iPS) cells, which are created by ‘reprogramming’ adult cells into a stem-cell-like state.

At first glance, iPS-cell research needs no help. Researchers flocked to the field soon after a recipe for deriving the cells from adult mouse cells was announced in 2006, partly because this offered a way to skirt the thorny ethical issues raised by extracting cells from human embryos. But the real allure of iPS cells was the promise of genetically matched tissues. Adult cells taken from a patient could be used to create stem cells that would, in turn, generate perfectly matched specialized tissues — replacement neurons, say — for cell therapy. Although the number of published papers from iPS-cell research has not yet caught up with that of ES-cell work (see ‘Inducing a juggernaut’), US funding for each approach is now roughly matched at about US$120 million a year. Read full article.

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IVF on Steroids: The Dangerous Off-Label Use of ‘Dex’ During Pregnancy

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diethylstilbestrolWhen Susan Manning, a 39-year-old woman just a few weeks into her first pregnancy, wrote to tell me she had been put on the steroid dexamethasone to prevent a miscarriage–and to ask whether she should be worried about taking this drug–at first I could not even process what she was saying. Dexamethasone is known to cross the placental barrier and impact fetal development, so the very idea of first trimester exposure sets off warning bells. Besides, dexamethasone is not known to help in preventing miscarriage. Susan’s story sounded too crazy to be true.

It also sounded too close to the history of DES (diethylstilbestrol). From the 1940s through the 1970s, some doctors gave pregnant women DES, a synthetic estrogen, to try to prevent miscarriage. In spite of clinical evidence that it didn’t work as intended, millions of fetuses were exposed in utero before doctors discovered that prenatal DES exposure could lead to infertility and deadly cancers. Just last week, Eli Lilly & Co. settled a suit brought by four sisters who believe their breast cancers were caused by prenatal DES exposure. Read full article.

 

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False-negative results found in HPV testing

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HPV TestPHOENIX — More than 12,000 women in the United States will be diagnosed with cervical cancer this year. Hundreds more may go undiagnosed because of the widespread use of a screening test that the Food and Drug Administration has not approved for detecting the human papillomavirus, or HPV, which causes nearly all cervical cancers.

Some of the largest national labs have for a decade routinely used test kits that contain a preservative, BD SurePath, that is approved for Pap tests but not HPV testing. The labs continue to use the tests despite an FDA warning June 8 that HPV tests using SurePath can produce false negatives and national guidelines that call for using only FDA-approved tests, an Arizona Republic investigation has found.

The result: Women may be told they are free of HPV when, in fact, they aren’t. Such a misdiagnosis can allow the virus or cancer to become established and more difficult to treat. Read full article.

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Could New Skyla Intrauterine Contraception Help Women Reach for the Stars?

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IUDIt’s evident that contraception, when used correctly and consistently, helps women and couples avoid pregnancy until they’re ready to become parents. Contraception has helped millions of women (and men) stay in school, achieve personal and professional life goals, and plan for healthy pregnancies.

Now, a new contraceptive intrauterine system (IUS), Skyla, will be added to the array of options a woman can choose from to prevent pregnancy.

Skyla is a U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA)-approved hormonal IUS, like Mirena, but smaller. You could think of it as Mirena’s little sister—both developed by Bayer HealthCare Pharmaceuticals. Both release the progestin levonorgestrel and both are over 99 percent effective at preventing pregnancy. Unlike Mirena, Skyla contains less levonorgestrel and only lasts up to three years whereas Mirena lasts for five.

And, because Skyla is smaller, it can fit into the uterus of women who have not carried a pregnancy to term. This means that younger women, who are less likely to have given birth, have another contraceptive method to choose from.

Historically, young women have relied on birth control pills for contraception, but many have become pregnant while using them. Pills, when used consistently and correctly, are 99 percent effective but are only 91 percent effective with typical use. Skyla and other IUDs are 99 percent effective and leave little room for user error. Read full article.

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Infertility Challenges: Facing the Issue with Action, Caring and Coping

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Risa and Eli, a couple married for two years and in their twenties, were anxious to start a family, but found themselves unable to conceive. *Chana, engaged at 39, was worried that at her age it would be difficult to get pregnant. *Miriam, a widow, had three children from her first marriage. Ten years after her husband passed away, she remarried. She was now 37 and her new husband, *Avi was 40. They wanted a child of their own, but close to a year into their marriage, she had not become pregnant – what to do?

Reproduction research done by the National Infertility Association shows that 7.3 million people in the United States, representing 12% of women of childbearing age, are affected by this problem. Infertility is defined, for women under the age of 35, as an inability to conceive after one year of trying to have a child. When a woman passes the age of 35, if she is trying unsuccessfully to get pregnant for six months, she should seek help. Besides having difficulty in conceiving, part of the problem for women of this age may also include the inability to carry a pregnancy to live birth. It also may not be her fault. Statistically, the causes for infertility are attributed equally to the female partner, the male partner, or a combination of both partners, or they may be unexplained. Read full article.